What Does Your Company's LMS Support Model Look Like?

I completely agree with you that Docebo needs to add more permissions to Power Users (question bank, CR - coming Q1 2022, channels, auto groups, enrollment rules). How many users do you have? How many LMS admins do you have to support your LMS?

Aye yay yay,

Maybe a story of promise?

I will admit that I come from a place where I was a party of 1 for the first 15 months at my initial gig. And sure enough the organization was going through massive change at the time….that change was a merger and the learning system that I was using at the time was going to scale from being administrated for 2 to 7 hospitals.

It felt sketchy - I was pitching at the right levels of leadership and had the right level of transparency, but the implementation felt slow at times - and well that happens when you are starting with a party of one.

I actually started with a very tight chain of custody and a limited PU / Superadmin model…strategically I brought PUs into build out and curate their own catalogs, build their own reports, have the internal service desk to assist with some aspects of the story, and solid baby steps were critical to build out the story. We went through an annual cycle of compliance and some of our service desk queues grew deep. And it was scary.

But staying true to the project charter? It wasa goal to find all critical path training and build business intelligence in the space of targeting audiences in the organization so that I can build a following - and the right folks accepted > “that” business was going to happen in there.

I had the equivalent of an extended enterprise - and it took one team that absolutely needed to have their own domain? It took them nearly a year and a half before they completely adopted it. It was ok - I knew they had a treasure trove of training that needed to happen…and anyone that was going to go into that one instance of the extended enterprise needed to pass through the “root” level site.

The story improved. The merger brought work and opportunity - the system was the only game on campus wired the right way to scale to the needs of the organization (I cant tell people enough, if you are not integrated with your HRIS systems to add and term users, you may want to take a pause and approach an implementation consultant) and some big learning had to happen. IT and HRIS Teams allowed for the expansion and leadership was aware that I could make it work with a hand. And so we brought in a slew of consultants that I lead to make it happen. And I got my +1.

Not shortly afterwards, a federal grant came in and the system was able to support it because of the extended enterprise. That spun off a domain for a team - but it was “on the side, and over there” making that an easy one. None of those folks reported to me, but that expanded the systems footprint. And some funding was available for infrastructure projects with the system….a plus...

And an L+D team that was running a fledgling home grown system for tracking learning was being merged with my group...and I was the party of 2 making it work for 2 hospitals. The other group was a party of 6 that could not effectively scale their homegrown solution beyond 1 hospital because they did not wrap their heads around critical path learning and did not have the buy in necessary to make a difference.

The rest is history - leadership aligned concepts of “the Learning System that had great potential and was reaching everyone”….and they knew to keep on growing with it. The “party of 6” became a “party of mine” and folks left...I rehired and had a team to support learning management with the 7 hospitals across NYC.

Today - that group is still surviving without me - and they are the only game in town to support orientations and systems training across the entire organization (of over a little more than 40K+ employees).

If I had to tell you lessons learned?

• Have a way of talking to your leadership. Steering committees may seem like nonsense to start, but the folks on the committee will align work for you and at the same time push and pull the system with the “work of today”.
  • Document the work of today and tomorrow for the steering committee...give updates about old and new business on a regular basis to them.
• Get them to agree to a centralized or decentralized effort model. Decentralized is fine? But it has serious consequences in the space of curation and content standards.
• Do not say no to your leadership no matter what the challenge is. Understand the ask, the timing of the need, and give them options.
  • Know that quietly it doesnt have to all come from just you….that is why we have consultants available to us.
• Continue to give teams and yourself strategic wins to continue adoption
  • It will foster champions across the organization that speak highly about you and the system publicly and privately.
• Know that for the most part? You need to keep it brief and clear with the people that count.
• Hit deadlines that are not just yours but your internal clientele and customers.
  • Work with clear “service level agreements” with your clientele and leadership.
• Be ready to listen to the politics - being in the content game? Others will attempt to persuade what your implementation is doing for the organization.
• My gosh roll up your sleeves and support things yourself strategically….I cant stress enough that learning management isn’t all Project Management...it is expertise in systems, auditing practices, instructional design, and so much more.

If you do all of those things? I think you can expand the story with the right business acumen.

Lastly? +1 about expanding permissions for PUs. It is the only way to effectivelysurvive with a decentralized model.